Brianna Ghey, Zuckerberg’s Apology, and the Wild West: The Long Road to Child Safety Online
‘I heard somebody once call the internet the wild west, and that’s basically what it is. And we’ve got our children, and we threw them into the deep end of it’. These are the words of Esther Ghey during a recent interview for the BBC. Ghey’s teenage daughter, Brianna, was murdered in February of last year by two fifteen-year-olds—Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were tried and sentenced this February 2024 as the perpetrators of an ‘exceptionally brutal’ killing that was motivated by hostility towards Brianna’s transgender identity and Scarlett’s disturbing ‘desire to kill’. Bravely attempting to push for a positive change in the wake of this tragedy, Esther Ghey has been campaigning for a shift in attitude and policy towards children’s usage of the internet and mobile phones. She states that is has become extremely difficult to ‘keep on top’ of what children are seeing and interacting with in virtual spaces and argues that a law should be introduced to define new types of phones suitable for under sixteen-year-olds that would include a software able to flag up harmful and dangerous search words on parents’ phones. Ghey is adamant that Brianna would have been safe if Scarlett and Eddie had been unable to search the internet for harmful terms and if more regulations had been in place. In a statement on the issue of social media companies profiting off of the activity of children on their websites, she says ‘greed needs to be taken out of the picture and we need to focus a little bit more on how we can help each other’.
The controversy around childhood usage of internet websites and social media is not new, yet efforts to regulate online spaces are sluggish and lagging behind a large number of testimonials on their negative and hurtful effects. Chief executive of Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads) Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify at a congressional hearing on the subject on the 31st of January during which intense probing led him to publicly apologize to bereaved parents of children affected by harmful internet usage. The somewhat wooden apology, which included a remark on further investment into ‘industry-leading efforts’, made headlines around the world as an important acknowledgement from the head of a massive social media conglomerate that something is wrong and that things need to change. The situation is dire. The families present at the hearing say that their children’s deaths were linked to issues such as bullying, grooming, posts about suicide, drugs obtained online, or asphyxiation from participating in the ‘blackout challenge’. Zuckerberg’s apology was reported globally because the most vulnerable group in our society is suffering and exposed to harm on an international scale.
A more mundane example of this widespread, deeply concerning, and generational problem is expressed by British therapist Catherine Knibbs in a video posted on Instagram. Recounting similar testimonials of children she has worked with, Knibbs describes experiences such as children being sextorted, cyberbulling, grooming, and body image issues. She concludes that ‘there’s something big happening beneath the surface’. Indeed, one of the main constraints in learning and understanding more about these problems is that children and teens have not been relaying their experiences to parents and adults. It is difficult to record the extent of the problem because their online activity is so hidden from view. An important factor to uncover the roots of these harmful experiences and subsequent solutions therefore seems to be providing spaces where children are listened to, not just by parents and therapists, but by politicians, decision-makers, and tech companies able to bring about necessary change. The evident lack of attention paid to this concerning reality needs to be remedied in anticipation of the lasting consequences that harmful internet usage may be having on an entire generation. Instead of solely expressing concerns or belatedly apologizing, both public and private organizations need to be taking more action to show children and teenagers that they care and to provide them with safe, enjoyable online spaces free of external threats.
Given these concerns, what does “regulating” the internet look like? Discussions have often focused on the role of parents, and it is true that parents are a crucial influence on children in terms of educating them on how to make use of online spaces responsibly. But there are two core issues with positioning this burden solely on parents. The first is that parents are not necessarily digitally literate, especially when in comes to the youth-oriented websites and platforms that children and teenagers may be using. The second is that if these issues were correctable on a personal level, they would not be so widespread and extensive. Parents alone cannot be expected to solve systemic suffering. In line with a more platform-oriented approach to regulation, the United Kingdom adopted an Online Safety Bill last October, which further regulates access to pornographic websites and obligates platforms to remove a plethora of harmful images. The Bill has been deemed a ‘vital first step’ by campaigners, but some sites have already stated that they will not be obeying certain sections that could not realistically be achieved, such as taking down every single harmful post. Developing effective regulation therefore involves developing an implementable system of checks focusing on root causes instead of solely removing existing content.
In July of last year, Sonia Livingstone posted a helpful roadmap to child protection online that highlights the political and policy dimensions of regulating of internet for children. Although attention towards the safety of children and teenagers in online spaces seems to be picking up pace, there remains an important gap between the urgency felt by families across the world and the delayed response by politicians, public leaders, and decision-makers in the private sphere. Let’s keep the discussion open and keep reaching out to our little ones—they need us to care.
Image courtesy of Dawn Hudson via Wikimedia Commons, ©2016. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
